A people's tragedy

In Poland, for example, the development of a national consciousness among the mass of the peasantry followed the spread of rural schooling and rural institutions such as the co-operatives, and the increased movement of the peasants into towns. In Georgia the rise of popular nationalism was linked to similar processes. The Georgian peasants were becoming increasingly integrated into the market economy, selling cereals, fruit, wine and tobacco to Armenian traders, while Tiflis itself, once a predominantly Armenian city, developed a Georgian working class from the poorer and immigrant peasants. As in Tiflis, so in Baku, the domination of Armenian merchants and industrialists served as a focus for the growing national and class consciousness of the immigrant Azeri peasants who flooded into the oil-industrial suburbs of Baku during the last decades of the century. In the Tatar regions of the Volga the origins of pan-Turkic nationalism were to be found in the Jadidist movement, which advocated the secular education of the native masses in opposition to the old élite schooling provided by the Muslim religious leaders. By 1900 the Volga Jadidists controlled over a thousand primary schools. Meanwhile, in the Kazan Teachers’ School and at Kazan University, there were the makings of a native and increasingly rebellious Tatar intelligentsia, although Kazan itself was mainly Russian.55

In the western Ukraine (Galicia) the development of the peasants’ national consciousness went hand in hand with the formation of a network of rural institutions such as reading clubs, credit unions, co-operative stores, choirs, insurance agencies, volunteer fire departments and gymnastic societies, which were linked with the national movement. The Ukrainian-language newspaper Baktivshchyna (‘Fatherland’) was the nationalists’ main route into the village: it attracted a mass peasant readership through its close attention to local affairs which it mixed with a subtle propaganda for the national cause. The readers of Baktivshchyna, like the members of the reading clubs and the other primary institutions of the national movement, were mainly the new and ‘conscious type’ of peasants — young and literate, thrifty and sober, and, above all, self-improving — who emerged from the parish schools around the turn of the century. They formed the village cohort of the national movement, together with the local priests, cantors and teachers, who slowly took over local government from the local mayors and their (mainly Jewish) henchmen in the villages, most of whom had been appointed by the Polish landowners. In this sense the national movement was thoroughly democratic: it brought politics to the village.56